Lawrence and Richard Aldington

There is something faintly comical about Lawrence’s response to Aldington’s novel, Death of a Hero.  The two men had known each other since shortly before the First World War and met up again at the end of 1928 in some buildings known as la Vigie on the tiny island of Port Cros, just off the French Mediterranean coast.  Death of Hero would be published in the following year and Lawrence appears only to have had access to what he calls `the first part’ and so never read the harrowing final section in which Aldington gives a first-hand account of what trench warfare was really like, full of enough grimly realistic detail to make most readers want to pick up a banner, rush outside and join the nearest anti-war demonstration.  The earlier part of the novel is an exemplification of Aldington’s belief that it was the regime of Cant before the war which was responsible for all the Cant soldiers had to endure whilst it was going on, and it offers a devastatingly bleak and hate-fuelled analysis of both sexual and family relations in the pre-war period.  According to its author himself, Lawrence was dismayed by what he read, suggested that the path Aldington was treading could lead to a lunatic asylum, and warned him against ruining his reputation.

         It is this last remark which has a comical sound.  The man making it was after all the recent author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and it was in fact on Port Cros that Lawrence received a batch of ferociously hostile and vituperative reviews of that novel, the effect of which was to make him load armful after armful of wood onto the open fire in a manic fashion after having muttered `No-one likes to be called a cesspool’.  The underlying meaning of his warning to Aldington could of course have been, `be careful of ruining your reputation, look what happened to me’; but there is no sense that Lawrence ever regretted having published Lady Chatterley, his reputation before it appeared was hardly spotless, and it was a work which had the advantage of making him relatively prosperous for the first time in his writing career.  What he was therefore responding to in Aldington, it seems to me, was a fundamental cynicism about human nature, a seething rage and anger that might or might not have been a consequence of his experiences during the war, and which, the more it is exacerbated, can indeed seem like a form of madness.  Lawrence himself was often angry and capable of outbursts of violent satirical rage, but in most of his writing there are intimations of hope and trust.  Like Nietzsche, he remained an optimistic believer in life however dire the environment in which he was obliged to live became, and however catastrophic his own personal circumstances.

         Things did not go smoothly on Port Cros, and not only because living conditions on the island were too primitive for someone as sick as Lawrence already was.  With Aldington were two women: Dorothy Yorke who had been his mistress for about ten years and Brigit Patmore who was in the process of becoming her replacement.  The resulting tensions were probably one of the reasons the party broke up earlier than had been planned with Lawrence and Frieda going off to pass the rest of the winter in the seaside resort of Bandol, further down the coast towards Spain.  It was there that Lawrence began writing the short poems which he chose to call Pansies, because that name can be associated with the French word for thoughts.  The very first of these was a satirical assault on Aldington which came to be known by a reference in its first line to a `noble Englishman’.  Called Ronald in the poem, this figure is described as having been accused by `one of his beloveds’ of being a clever sadist who, after he has skilfully made a woman fall in love with him, will turn away and wipe her from his consciousness `As if she were a worm, or a hired whore who bored him’.  The reason for this is because he doesn’t really like women but, `like almost all Englishmen’, is `an instinctive homosexual’, although `far too great a coward ever to admit his instincts’. 

         If all the `pansies’ were like `The Noble Englishmen’ they would not deserve the relatively high repute they enjoy amongst Lawrentians.  It seems clear that Lawrence is reporting what he had heard Dorothy Yorke say about Aldington on Port Cros, yet that may not have been his only source of information.  In that first part of Death of a Hero which Lawrence read, for example, its author credits his hero’s first girl friend with giving him the capacity to love a member of the opposite sex and having therefore saved him from `the latent homosexuality which lurks in so many Englishmen and makes them for ever dissatisfied with their women’.  Here then is a broad hint for the poem although had Lawrence been able to read on he would have found not so much hints as provocations.  In the second part of Death of a Hero, when its protagonist has begun to mix in London’s literary and artistic circles, there is a glaringly obvious portrait of Lawrence in a character called Bobbe.  He is the editor of a socialist journal, which does not at first sound very Lawrence-like, but is then described as sandy-haired and narrow-chested `with spiteful blue eyes and a malevolent class-hatred’.  The Thersites of his day, no-one is prepared to respond to his spite with violence because `his looks were a perpetual reminder of [the] disease’ from which `he had been dying for twenty years’.  What helps to make this portrait of Lawrence unmistakable is the suggestion that Bobbe was talented enough to have real influence if only he could ditch `his fatuous theories of the Unconscious, which were a singular mixture of misapprehended Theosophy and ill-digested Freud’.  In spite of his working-class origins, Aldington claims, Bobbe yearned for affairs with upper-class women `although he was obviously a homosexual type’.  Later in the novel, the hero’s mistress suggests that he ought to ask Bobbe to let him write articles criticising the `obsolete laws’ against homosexuality still operative in England; but he declines and says that Bobbe could write them himself since it is a subject `far more likely to attract him’.  Lawrence probably never saw Aldington’s version of him, and certainly he could hardly have been aware of it when he wrote `The Noble Englishman’.  What this means is that his poem then becomes a wholly inadvertent example of how to get your retaliation in first.

         Not all the references to Lawrence in Death of a Hero are uncomplimentary.  Bobbe is said to have `admirable energy’ as well as a `sometimes remarkable intuition into character’ while later in the novel its narrator, describing some difficulties he had with the British authorities whilst on leave from the war, remarks that these were `nothing compared with the persecution endured by D. H. Lawrence, probably the greatest living English novelist, and a man of whom — in spite of his failings — England should be proud’.  What nevertheless stays more firmly in the mind is the emphasis on failings and it seems clear that Aldington’s sense of these had been intensified by the time he had spent with Lawrence on Port Cros, just as this same coming together had sharpened Lawrence’s awareness of what he did not like about his host.  In his new biography, Andrew Harrison has cited evidence to suggest it was on the island that Lawrence first became fully aware of Frieda’s affair with their former landlord from Spotorno, Angelo Ravagli, and discovered that Aldington was helping her to maintain a secret correspondence with him.  If that is so, it would hardly have sweetened the atmosphere.  In November 1929, Lawrence wrote to Pino Orioli and asked him to send Aldington a copy of The Story of Dr Manente, the translation from Lasca Lawrence had been working on in Port Cros and which Orioli had just published.  `He did not send me his novel’, he added, in an obvious reference to Death of a Hero, `we had it in MS at the Vigie last year — and I disliked the first part intensely.  But since the Vigie I don’t write to him — that’s a long story.’  A long and no doubt interesting story, but one that can perhaps never be fully told, given the distance in time and the lack of evidence?